WARREN ELLIS is a graphic novelist and author of the NYT best-selling novel GUN MACHINE. His graphic novel GLOBAL FREQUENCY is being developed for television by Jerry Bruckheimer and FOX. He is the writer of the graphic novel RED, adapted into the film starring Bruce Willis and Helen Mirren. His next book is NORMAL from FSG.

In Which I Get Beaten Up By Books

So, back in August, I proclaimed that I had cracked New Book, a thing that had been fighting me every step of the way, announced that I’d nailed down the first thousand words, and that forward progress was inevitable. I had crushed the book, driven it before me and heard the lamentation of its women.

I am, of course, a fucking moron.

Three months of writing, rewriting, giving up and walking away, coming back and burning out the rot with fire, walking away and hitting things followed. This book is fighting me. It wants to be written, but it does not want to make it easy.

Therefore, after throwing away everything but the first 800 words and starting again, I give you the return of the DEATH BAR:

In which there is a riot, and an interrogation of sorts, and I show you how to do something really fucking horrible with a pencil.

The NEW HUMANIST, of all magazines, sent me this book to review for them. I have to finish it this week, somehow. I haven’t read any of Seth Grahame-Smith’s other works, and know them only by reputation. So far, I can say that, to this point, it’s a Ripping Yarn of considerable charm, and that Grahame-Smith does know his way around a sentence. It’s also, a hundred pages in, a lot more traditionally Christian than I was expecting, and stands in some contrast to Colm Toibin’s THE TESTAMENT OF MARY, also released in the last month, and which I’m going to write a little bit about later today.

Incidentally, NEW HUMANIST has for you some free downloadable Christmas Cards by the famous British political cartoonist and illustrator Martin Rowson. Go and take a look.

(It’s the British Humanist Association that I’m connected with, not the Rationalist Association that runs NEW HUMANIST. But we’re all in broad agreement that Satan is real.)

Also in today’s (re-)reading, from the Futurist Manifesto (as found in 100 ARTISTS’ MANIFESTOS, ed. Alex Danchev):

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